Thoughts of Grace

Sweet Peas are blooming.

Good Morning

Philippians 1:9-10 And this I pray: that your love may abound yet more and more and extend to its fullest development in knowledge and all keen insight [that your love may display itself in greater depth of acquaintance and more comprehensive discernment], So that you may surely learn to sense what is vital, and approve and prize what is excellent and of real value [recognizing the highest and the best, and distinguishing the moral differences], and that you may be untainted and pure and unerring and blameless [so that with hearts sincere and certain and unsullied, you may approach] the day of Christ [not stumbling nor causing others to stumble].

Tradition says that when they carried Saint John for the last time into the church, he lifted up his feeble hands to the listening congreation, and said,
“Little children, love one another.”
The words are echoing yet throughout the world.
More precious and important even than faith is heaven ly love. Without it faith must ultimately wither. Many of God’s most powerful workers after a time lose their power because they lose the spirit of love. This is the crowning grace of Christian character. It has a thousand shades, and it is in the finer touches that its glory consists.
Every new experience of life is but a school to learn some lesson of love. Let us not try to expel our teachers. Let us welcome them and so learn the lesson, that they may soon pass on and leave us to make new advances.
If mountains can be removed by faith, is there less power in love?
The immense arms from either side of the Forth Bridge had been completed, slowly and steadily they had been built out; all that was now needed at the center of the mighty arch was the final riveting.
The day fixed was cold and chilly, and cold contracts metals. In spite of fires set under the iron to expand it the inch or two required, the union could not be completed and the day’s program was a failure.
But the next day the sun rose bright; under its genial warmth the iron expanded, the holes came opposite each other, and the riveters had nothing to do but drive the binding bolts home.

1Corinthians 13:13 And so faith, hope, love abide
[faith—conviction and belief respecting man’s relation to God and divine things;
hope—joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation;
love—true affection for God and man, growing out of God’s love for and in us],
these three; but the greatest of these is love.

“Love one another” . . .Today
With my prayers, desiring yours, Leslie

Click on the link to see a picture of Forth Bridge, a bridge for trains, and a little of its history. It is a beautiful bridge.